Here Are More Detailed Maps of High Cadmium Levels in North and Southeast Portland

The Multnomah County Health Department is sharing new maps that highlight troubling cadmium exposure in North and Southeast Portland. The maps offer magnified views of a previous map that detailed elevated cadmium levels around Bullseye Glass and Uroboros Glass. Those two companies have come under intense scrutiny since the Mercury first reported on elevated levels of the carcinogens cadmium and arsenic last week.

Since they're essentially just blowups, the maps don't offer much in the way of new revelations, but they do give concerned Portlanders a better sense of the exact streets affected. Near Bullseye, that includes Cleveland High School and Winterhaven K-8, along with a 100-child day care center. The health department cautions that the maps are "not exact or precise" and that they use "a limited data set from October 2015 to correlate cadmium air concentrations with concentrations in moss, an approach to mapping air pollutants that is new and still developing."

Nonetheless, it's about the most detailed information we've got at this point.

Here's a snapshot of the map from North Portland. Darker shades denote higher risk—with the lightest orange representing risks of between 1 and 9 additional cases of cancer per million people routinely exposed, and the dark red representing a risk of more than 50 additional cases per million people. Cadmium, which tends to stay in the human body a long time, also presents a risk for kidney damage.